PR: 36109
3 March 2014

A burning question: Why we have to use wood wisely - by Karl Morris, MD, Norbord Europe

Norbord is committed to environmental issues and its latest Use Wood Wisely campaign

The wood panel industry is part of a cycle of grow, use, re-use and recycle in which the harvesting and regeneration of forests is balanced and the carbon in the wood is prevented from escaping back into the environment until it can no longer be reused or recycled. Then, and only then, is it burned to recover the energy. This is known as the "hierarchy of use" and is recognised by European and UK governments as the best use of biomass.

Wood is one of mankind's oldest building materials and is still one of our most valuable raw materials.

Today we are surrounded by products made from wood and we tend to take it for granted. Yet wood is a precious resource and one we need to use wisely.

For most of history, wood has been simply felled from natural forests as and when it was required, with no attempt to replenish the stock for future generations.

Today, forestry is a highly complex industry and, while there continues to be a problem with illegal logging, it is otherwise a highly regulated one.

In the developed world, most of the wood consumed by industry is fast-growing softwood. More expensive slow-growing hardwoods, such as oak, beech and maple are generally used for applications where their natural strength and appearance is highly valued - in furniture for example, or flooring.

Softwood timbers are also used in their natural state - for example in the building industry for roof trusses and timber frames and in the furniture industry for carcassing. But softwoods are also broken down so that their fibres can be reconstituted into a huge variety of other products. We see them everyday in products like MDF, chipboard and OSB.

The forests that provide the softwoods for these products are among the largest areas of managed forest anywhere in the world and play a vital role not only in the world economy but in maintaining an ecological balance in the environment.

Forests are often described as "the lungs of the world", and for good reason. All trees and plants absorb carbon dioxide gas and give off oxygen as they grow. The carbon they absorb from the atmosphere is used to build fibrous material - wood, in the case of trees. Oxygen, of course, is essential to animal life-forms, including humankind.

Today we are all keenly aware of the effects of greenhouse gasses (CO₂in particular) are having on the environment. They are driving an increase in global temperatures which has far-reaching consequences.

This of course is why we are required by law to reduce man-made carbon emissions by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, making more use of renewable energy sources and minimising our energy requirement wherever possible.

It is natural to assume that if we must reduce carbon emissions and safeguard the forests that absorb so much atmospheric carbon, then we should do everything possible to reduce the number of trees we cut down every year.

This is where we encounter a situation which, on the face of it, seems paradoxical. Most people would assume that the tropical hardwood forests, which are indeed under threat, are the ‘lungs of the world' but in reality, the vast softwood forests are more productive per hectare when it comes to converting carbon into wood. And this is simply because softwood trees like pine and spruce grow far more quickly than hardwood trees.

The paradox is that the forestry process actually increases the rate at which carbon is removed from the atmosphere. A young tree absorbs more carbon than a mature tree because it's building timber very quickly. In a well-managed forest, mature trees are not left standing too long but are harvested and young saplings replanted in their place. These saplings grow rapidly, absorbing carbon at a high rate in the process.

Being able to grow and re-grow is something a forest can do that no oil-well, quarry or mine can match. Wood is a renewable resource; it will never run out so long as we humans put back what we take out. This is what the forestry industry does - in fact, re-planting currently exceeds timber harvesting and the gross area of temperate softwood forest, far from dwindling, is actually increasing.

Of course, wood is not just our oldest building material, it is also our oldest fuel and has always been an important source of energy. It is no surprise, therefore, that wood is now in increasing demand as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels.

Biomass, along with other alternative renewable energy technologies including wind, solar and tidal power, is being promoted energetically by governments and environmentalists the world over. The term "biomass" is used to describe any biological fuel source and can include domestic waste as well as special fast-growing crops such as miscanthus (also known as elephant grass) and maize. Wood, however, is the most popular and readily available of these biomass fuels.

Small-scale wood-fired heating systems have enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years and have proved especially popular for local mini-district heating systems in schools, businesses and other commercial users.

But the most significant development in the use of biomass is in the generation of electricity, often on a huge scale. Electricity generation based on renewable energy is seen by the government as an essential factor in helping the UK meet its legally binding EU target of obtaining 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. At least 30% of UK electricity generation will need to be produced by renewable sources if this target is to be met.

In order to switch from traditional coal or gas-fired generation to renewables, the energy companies need to invest, and heavily too. But like any business, without a real commercial incentive to justify the investment, no electricity company is going to pump hundreds of millions of pounds into new technology - however good it might be for the planet.

The government therefore cajoles the energy companies into making this investment through a mixture of legislation and grant subsidies. The Renewables Obligation, introduced 11 years ago, requires each electricity supplier to source a steadily increasing percentage of their power from renewable sources. In the first year, this percentage was 3%. It has risen steadily ever since and now (April 2013 - March 2014) it stands at 20.6%.

These electricity suppliers meet their obligations by presenting Renewables Obligation Certificate (ROCs) to the regulator Ofgem. These prove the amount of renewable electricity the supplier has sourced. Where insufficient ROCs are presented to cover their obligation, suppliers make a payment into a ‘buy-out' fund. The proceeds of this fund are paid back to suppliers in proportion to how many ROCs they have presented. Hence the system creates a market and ROCs can be traded at prices that differ from the buy-out price.

More recently, the government has further incentivised the use of biomass with the introduction of the Renewable Heat Incentive. This is a straightforward grant scheme and effectively subsidises biomass energy plants in much the same was as the Feed-In tariff which was introduced with the same legislation, the 2008 Energy Act.

The purpose of these schemes is to make it worthwhile for the energy industry to start using renewables, be they wind, tidal, solar or biomass. Without these incentives, electricity generators would baulk at the heavy investments and risk involved in developing new technologies and would continue to favour the Earth's dwindling fossil-fuel reserves, gas in particular.

And so it is that the UK's biggest power generators are now heavily involved in burning biomass alongside more traditional fuels. The perfect example of this is Drax in Yorkshire - for many years known as the UK's biggest coal power station and, more controversially, our single largest emitter of CO². Drax has recently spent millions converting itself into a coal/biomass co-generation facility and now burns wood as well as fossil fuels.

Burning wood is seen as a green alternative to coal; after all, wood is renewable and as we have seen, trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere as they grow. Hence proponents of large-scale biomass generation argue that burning wood is carbon-neutral. But these plants burn wood fibre at a phenomenal rate; Drax currently burns around 6,500 tonnes every day and has plans to increase its consumption threefold. The trees that provide that feedstock will have taken years to absorb the carbon that, in a matter of hours, is released back into the atmosphere. Replanting will eventually recover that carbon; but over generations, not over hours; and global warming is an issue we face today.

Felling trees simply to burn them for fuel on an industrial scale is therefore a disaster for the environment, not a benefit. Felling and replanting only contributes to a net reduction in carbon emissions if the trees that are cut down are then preserved in the form of durable products such as furniture, buildings and all the other day-to-day products that are made of wood or wood fibre. That's because these products store the carbon that the trees have absorbed as they have grown rather than releasing it immediately as a power station does.

The wood panel industry is part of a cycle of grow, use, re-use and recycle in which the harvesting and regeneration of forests is balanced and the carbon in the wood is prevented from escaping back into the environment until it can no longer be reused or recycled. Then, and only then, is it burned to recover the energy. This is known as the "hierarchy of use" and is recognised by European and UK governments as the best use of biomass. Ironically, for more than a decade, Norbord has been the UK's largest single producer and consumer of renewable heat energy.

But it does so by following the hierarchy of use generating that heat by burning unusable residues, bark and twigs to heat the thermal oil used in its presses and the heat used to dry the wood being processed.

Wood fibre is primarily our industry's raw material and we rely entirely on UK wood, virgin and recovered. The industry is now under huge pressure from the large-scale biomass energy sector because the government subsidies allow the energy generators to pay more than twice the price currently paid by the UK wood panel industry for its primary raw material. As a result, this has driven up average wood prices by 60% in the past five years.

So the government's misguided attempt to wean the power industry off fossil fuels and onto so-called ‘green' renewables is not only failing to help the environment but also failing to protect the economy. Burning trees to generate electricity is costing consumers and tax-payers billions and it is not helping the environment one bit.

However it is penalising an industry which not only employs thousands of people in the UK but also has one of the smallest carbon footprints of any in the manufacturing sector.

In 2013, following vigorous lobbying by the furniture and wood panel products industries (not to mention harsh criticism by environmental groups including Greenpeace), the government announced that it would cap subsidies to new electricity-only biomass plants and end them altogether by 2027.

This is a welcome return to common sense but it is a belated and costly U-turn. Before we notice any improvement, the problem will worsen; Drax still plans to bring two additional 600MW biomass plants on-stream between now and 2017.

For further information on Norbord, please call 01786 812 225 or visitwww.norbord.co.uk.

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With compliments:
Alison Relf
Taylor Alden Ltd
Unit 2, Temple Place
247 The Broadway
London
SW19 1SD
Tel: 020 8543 3866
Email:alison@tayloralden.co.uk